Belgian construction companies, facility managers, and project-based service businesses often use Exact Online as their accounting and project management backbone. Exact Online tracks project budgets, actual costs, and work-in-progress, but only as accurately as the hours data that is entered into it. When that data comes from paper timesheets collected weekly and manually re-entered, the project cost picture is always a week behind and riddled with entry errors. Connecting Suivo’s field time registration platform directly to Exact Online changes this: project managers see live cost data from field hours, without manual re-entry.
How Exact Online manages project hours
Exact Online’s project module allows Belgian SMEs to:
- Create projects with phases and activities.
- Budget planned hours and costs per phase.
- Record actual hours worked against each project and phase.
- Calculate the difference between planned and actual (the project margin).
- Support work-in-progress (WIP) accounting for financial reporting.
The project hours entry in Exact Online is typically done either by workers entering their own hours via the Exact Online portal (a manual self-entry process) or by an administrator importing a weekly timesheet file.
Both approaches have the same problem: the data is entered after the fact, often at the end of the week, from memory or from paper notes. In a construction company where a team of 8 workers spent different amounts of time on 4 different project phases across 5 sites, weekly manual entry is slow, inaccurate, and a constant source of reconciliation work at month end.
What a time registration integration with Exact Online looks like
When field time registration is connected to Exact Online:
1. Workers clock in on a mobile app at the start of each task, linking their clock-in to the specific project phase or activity code from Exact Online.
2. They clock out when the task ends, either when moving to a different task or at end of day.
3. The time registration platform calculates actual hours per worker, per project, per phase.
4. At the configured interval (daily, or at end of the working day), the platform pushes the hour records to Exact Online via the REST API.
5. Exact Online updates the project’s actual hours, recalculates the cost, and the project manager sees the current project margin in real time.
The project manager no longer waits until Friday to know what the week’s hours looked like. They see Monday’s hours on Monday afternoon. When a project phase is running over budget, they know on Wednesday, not the following Tuesday.
What must align between systems before the integration works
Worker identifiers: The time registration system and Exact Online must refer to the same workers using the same identifier. This is typically the Exact Online employee number. Worker records in both systems must match.
Project and activity codes: Workers clocking in must select the correct project and phase from the list available in the time registration app. This list must be synchronised from Exact Online. If a new project is created in Exact Online but not yet available in the time registration app, workers will assign their hours to the wrong project.
Hour types: Exact Online differentiates between regular hours, overtime, and other hour types for project costing purposes. The time registration export must include the correct hour type code so Exact Online applies the right cost rate.
Cost rates: The cost per hour for each worker (or worker category) must be consistent between systems for the project cost calculation to be accurate.
Setting up these alignments before go-live, and maintaining them when new projects are created or worker records change, is the ongoing administration requirement of the integration.
Work-in-progress and financial reporting
For Belgian SMEs that use the percentage-of-completion method for revenue recognition (common in construction), work-in-progress (WIP) calculations are a critical financial reporting element. WIP depends on knowing how many hours have been spent on each project to date, which, with manual timesheets, is always a week or more behind.
With daily time registration integration:
- Exact Online’s WIP balances are updated daily.
- Month-end closing does not require a manual hours correction.
- Auditors reviewing financial statements see WIP figures that are supported by timestamped field records, not weekly approximations.
For Belgian construction companies in particular, where projects span months and accurate WIP is material to financial statements, the combination of field time registration and Exact Online project accounting is a significant improvement over the traditional timesheet-to-ERP workflow.
Getting started with the Suivo-Exact Online integration
Suivo’s API integrations include a connector for Exact Online. The setup process:
1. Authenticate the Suivo platform to your Exact Online environment via the Exact Online API.
2. Import your project and activity code list from Exact Online into Suivo.
3. Map your Suivo worker records to their Exact Online employee identifiers.
4. Configure the export schedule and hour type mapping.
5. Run a test export for one team over one day and verify the hours appear correctly in Exact Online.
6. Roll out to the full workforce once the test is validated.
The integration is configured once and runs automatically. New projects created in Exact Online are available in Suivo’s app within the next sync cycle (typically within 15 minutes for standard API integrations).
Ready to connect field hours directly to Exact Online?
Suivo integrates with Exact Online to give Belgian SMEs real-time project cost data from field time registration, eliminating manual timesheet entry and improving project margin visibility. See Suivo products or view pricing.
